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Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance

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ISSN: 1743-9884 (Print) 1743-9892 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjem20

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices:

digital technologies and distance education during
the coronavirus emergency

Ben Williamson, Rebecca Eynon & John Potter

To cite this article: Ben Williamson, Rebecca Eynon & John Potter (2020) Pandemic
politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies and distance education during
the coronavirus emergency, Learning, Media and Technology, 45:2, 107-114, DOI:
10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641

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LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY
2020, VOL. 45, NO. 2, 107–114
https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1761641

EDITORIAL

Pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices: digital technologies

and distance education during the coronavirus emergency

The first special issue of Learning, Media and Technology of 2020, entitled ‘Education and technology
into the 2020s: speculative futures’, presented a series of papers looking to the future of critical
research on educational technologies. As we write, just a few months later, with the coronavirus pan-
demic sweeping around the world, the future appears more uncertain than ever. Global infection and
illness, population lockdowns, and mass closures of educational institutions have engulfed countries
across the planet in the short time between issues of this journal.
The global pandemic is of course not only a serious public health emergency, but a political, econ-
omic and social emergency too. Scholarship across myriad disciplines in years to come will examine
the medical, political, economic and social factors defining our present moment. Many of these
issues will be of interest to readers of Learning, Media and Technology. They include political man-
oeuvring in relation to the pandemic, from misinformation and economic measures to policies of
social distancing, quarantining and isolation; the use and misuse of large-scale data, statistics and
visualizations; new forms of digitally mediated work, culture and personal life; surveillance systems
for ‘contact tracing’; the use of predictive epidemiological modelling; the development of techniques
for better public understanding of science; and the political use of behavioural economics as a public
pedagogy of population management. Future papers in this journal will be written in the context of
changes currently being experienced at planetary scale, and potentially dramatic shifts in the
relationships between science, technology and society.
In one key area we feel Learning, Media and Technology can and should make a more direct con-
tribution to knowledge and practice during the COVID-19 pandemic: the switch to online and digi-
tal education formats and the rise of ‘remote’ forms of teaching and learning as a consequence of
mass closures of schools, colleges and universities. In this moment of pandemic politics, where con-
tests are being fought at multiple scales and levels over the ways to handle and resolve the crisis, dis-
tance education has become a widespread matter of concern for political authorities, education
businesses, charities, teachers, parents and students alike. Education has become an emergency mat-
ter, and along with it, educational technologies have been positioned as a frontline emergency ser-
vice. In recent years Learning, Media and Technology has become a key publication for critical
studies of education and technology. Other outlets have responded to the rapid switch to online edu-
cation with useful guidance, advice, and references to extant research from promising studies that
might support educators to make the best of this new educational emergency. But the need remains
for critical reflection on the planetary pivot to digitally mediated remote and distance education.
We have no wish to denigrate or criticize online distance education, but rather, the aim of this
brief editorial is twofold. First, we want to raise a series of critical cautions, based on previous papers
and special issues published in the journal, against simplistic and opportunistic claims that edu-
cational technologies are a ready-made remedy for the current crisis. Second, we want to issue a
call for future research to examine, in up-close detail, the effects and consequences of the expansion
and embedding of digital technologies and media in education systems, institutions and practices
across the world. We don’t necessarily see these issues as new or unique to the pandemic, but
they are currently being experienced more acutely and affectively by educators, students and parents
around the world, from the early years through to higher education. Within our own specialist area
of research and practice, pandemic politics is now playing out through attempts to thoroughly

© 2020 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

108 EDITORIAL

embed public education systems and practices, at international reach, in increasingly powerful tech-
nological systems. We raise here four significant issues in education and technology for reinvigorated
exploration.

The political economy of pandemic pedagogy

A distinctive approach to pedagogy has emerged as a global norm in the opening months of 2020.
Distance education, remote teaching, and online instruction are not new approaches to pedagogy or
curriculum design, but they have taken on renewed salience. Debates have already commenced on
social media about whether to term current practices ‘emergency remote education’ in contextual
recognition of the extraordinary circumstances in which they have been developed and deployed.
These ‘pandemic pedagogies’ have also become the focus for the education technology industry.
Since the effects of the coronavirus crisis on education systems first became apparent in south east
Asia early in 2020, education companies and technology businesses have ramped up their marketing
of products to support online learning considerably. Many companies, including videoconferencing
and educational content providers, have offered up previously for-fee services for free for temporary
periods, alongside celebrity figures posting livestreaming educational content from workouts and
dance classes to guest lessons and online Q&A sessions. To a significant extent, these charitable
offers have provided many tools and resources to enable educators to meet the high demands of
switching to online teaching under extremely tense conditions and in tightly compressed timelines.
Perhaps more importantly, they may help parents, now responsible for supporting their children’s
remote education, to keep their children occupied, active, and mentally stimulated during periods
of population lockdown, isolation and quarantine.
Yet at the same time, it appears clear that certain actors in the edtech industry are treating the
crisis as a business opportunity, with potentially long-term consequences for how public education
is perceived and practised long after the coronavirus has been brought under control. The marketing
of these products to teachers, by email and online on social media, has been intense, as the closure of
schools and colleges has become an opportunity for the edtech industry to prove its benefits, to
extend its reach, and to grow market share. Early in March 2020, the investment bank BMO Capital
Markets predicted a spike in edtech stocks. ‘While we are uncomfortable citing “winners” in the cor-
onavirus situation, some companies may be positioned better than others,’ it claimed. ‘Specifically,
those that specialize in online education could see increased interest should the situation worsen’
(EdSurge 2020). Edu-businesses such as Pearson have made their online learning services available
for free to new subscribing institutions, and launched packages of ‘homeschooling’ advice, resources
and guidance. Many of the world’s largest and most successful technology businesses have also
expanded their educational services rapidly, including Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Zoom. Mar-
kets have long been a central concern of the global edtech industry, but the pandemic may have pre-
sented it with remarkable business opportunities for profit-making, as well as enhanced influence
over the practices of education.
In a recent special issue of Learning, Media and Technology, Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt, and
Ivarsson (2020) speculated that education systems may become increasingly platform-based,
especially those systems that already exhibit a high degree of decentralization. The ‘platformisation
of schooling’, in a context where ‘schooling as an institution has already been broken-up, decentra-
lised and marketised’, they argued, is already leading to ‘a situation with little state governance where
the dominant technical platforms are amongst few centralising powers uniting schools as a national
school system’ and ‘global commercial platforms incorporated into public education risk challenging
education as a public good’ (Hillman, Bergviken Rensfeldt, and Ivarsson 2020, 7–8).
Their political economy analysis of educational platformization suggests the need for serious cau-
tion regarding the expansion of edtech and other platform companies during the coronavirus pan-
demic. At the present time, public education has been forcibly decentralized into students’ own
homes, largely disaggregated from the institutions and practices of education and instead
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 109

repositioned as a form of homeschooling mediated by technology tools, edu-businesses and other

institutions. Many edtech businesses have in fact been seeking to finesse the model of ‘distance’ edu-
cation for years. They have sought to make education available remotely from schools or campuses,
while also inserting platforms as intermediaries between educational institutions and their students,
acting at a distance to shape the possibilities of teaching and learning. The current state of ‘pandemic
pedagogy’, in other words, may not be seen by some businesses as simply an emergency response to a
public health and political crisis, but as a rapid prototype of education as a private service and an
opportunity to recentralize decentralized systems through platforms.
Beyond simple market-making strategies, a range of coalitions and networks has formed to pro-
mote forms of online learning as both a short-term response to the pandemic and a long-term ambi-
tion for whole education systems. The Global Education Coalition announced by UNESCO, for
example, is an international partnership intended to help countries mobilize resources and
implement ‘innovative and context-appropriate solutions to provide education remotely, leveraging
hi-tech, low-tech and no-tech approaches’, both in order to ‘mitigate the immediate disruption
caused by COVID-19 and establish approaches to develop more open and flexible education systems
for the future’ (UNESCO 2020). Its partners include Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Zoom along-
side influential international organizations the OECD and World Bank, all now aligned to the com-
mon mission of extending online education globally. The World Bank has actively worked with
government ministries around the world to enable online education, while the OECD has begun
to talk of COVID-19 as a crisis of ‘human capital’ development, and of the pandemic as ‘an oppor-
tunity for experimentation and for envisioning new models of education and new ways of using the
face-to-face learning time’ (OECD 2020). These policy-influencing international organizations are
now enabling private platforms providers to extend their reach into previously unattainable terri-
tories and spaces.
At the national level, coalitions are also promoting their own forms of remote education. In the
UK, the Department for Education issued a £300,000 grant to Oak National Academy, a startup
online school backed by Teach First (the private teacher education provider) and researchED (an
influential network promoting research evidence of ‘what works’ in the field of education), at the
same time as the public broadcaster the BBC revamped its online Bitesize catalogue and iPlayer con-
tent for home learning. The US-based Wide Open Schools, similarly, was established by Common
Sense Media and powered by Salesforce to provide ‘a free collection of the best online learning
experiences for kids’, with partners including Khan Academy, Google, YouTube, Apple and
Zoom. Dominant styles of education policy that have historically distributed power to multisector
networks are now empowering private companies to become infrastructural substrates to public edu-
cation, in ways that may solidify and consolidate in years to come.
These snapshot examples indicate how the new pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices of
online education, remote teaching and homeschooling have become embedded in political and econ-
omic contests. There is also a geopolitical angle, reflecting how technology companies from the US
and China have sought commercial advantage and expansion in education (Knox 2020). Global tech
platforms are being empowered alongside national and international policy-influencing organiz-
ations that seek ‘human capital’ as the key outcome of education. Emergency education models
are being treated as prototypes for education systems to emulate far beyond the pandemic. Although,
then, in many respects the switch to online education around the world has been haphazard and
chaotic in practice, critical studies will need to locate these changes in the broader political economy
of the COVID-19 pandemic, its antecedents and long-term consequences.

Digital inequalities during the pandemic

As articles in this journal have consistently shown (e.g., Beckman et al. 2018) not all young people are
the well connected, digitally savvy, ‘digital natives’ that the rhetoric around young people and tech-
nology would have us believe. Instead, there is significant variety in the ways that young people can
110 EDITORIAL

access, navigate and use the internet and other new technologies, with an important minority who
are excluded entirely. As schools close due to the COVID-19 outbreak, and many teachers look to
digital means to connect to their students, education policy makers are beginning to realize that
the rhetoric around young people is incorrect, and now some young people are excluded from
much of their education and their social networks.
This has led to a well-meaning response – to try to get these young people connected as soon as is
possible. But many of those arguing for a move in this direction have not worked in this domain
before or are aware of the many past home access schemes to get all young people connected. All
young people should have the ability to access and skills to use technology effectively and safely
to achieve their own goals (educational and otherwise). Yet it is extremely hard to get such schemes
right. Three common questions that such schemes have to address are:
What is an adequate level of digital access? At first glance, this seems to be an obvious question –
provide laptops and / or internet access to those who don’t have it. But access is not a dichotomous
measure, it is multifaceted. It is about the quality of that access. For example, do all children need
their own device? If not, how many young people could reasonably use the same device? What is
the age group that such a scheme would impact the most? Is a mobile sufficient, or do young people
need a laptop for learning and education? What are the minimum technical specifications a device
should have? What kind of internet connection is sufficient?
How can young people and their families be supported to technology in the home? Young people
who do not have digital access at home are likely to have less digital skills than their peers, and it
is likely that their parents and guardians also do not have strong sets of digital skills. Using the inter-
net contains multiple opportunities but also risks. How young people are supported to develop those
skills and help protect them from harm is central. Typically, strong filters are placed on devices that
make them less usable and less like the digital experiences of their peers. Instead, expert support is
required (from teachers or others) to help young people and their families navigate the internet in a
safe and effective way; and also provide them with ways to get assistance if the device breaks or the
internet fails.
How can longevity of the scheme be assured? In the rush to connect young people, quick fixes are
being sought, where devices are to be borrowed and internet connection provided free of charge for a
short period of time. However, this uncertainty over ownership and responsibilities stymies use and
often causes a great deal of stress as families feel under pressure to begin paying for the internet once
the initial ‘free’ period is over. Ideally devices should be given to the young person and their families
to ensure they have agency over what they use it for and why; and there needs to be clear guidelines
about what happens when the internet gets stopped, with significant care not to push families in to
continuing with a scheme that cannot afford.
Beyond these three questions, there are also some fundamental issues that need to be agreed upon.
A central focus needs to be defining what ‘success’ for a particular scheme would mean. In the past,
outcome measures of such initiatives have often focused on whether access is provided – e.g., a laptop
is delivered and an internet connection set up. This is reasonable, but then other assumptions, that
are not based on any evidence, are made about the ‘inevitable’ positive benefits the scheme has
brought to the young person and their family. However, we know that the benefits from using tech-
nology vary widely, with those better off tending to benefit more educationally and socially. Digital
connectivity is important, but it does not overcome all inequalities young people face - during
COVID-19 or otherwise.
It is crucial to consider how any access scheme connects with the broader plan for providing
young people with a distance education of quality. Schools have many roles and purposes, and pro-
viding distance education at this time for all young people is hugely challenging. Education is not one
thing and is not experienced in the same way. The inequalities in our school system and wider society
are only exacerbated by the current crisis. It is therefore really important that all schemes, digital or
not, work together to support less well-off young people and schools. A holistic vision will work bet-
ter than a piecemeal approach.
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 111

As readers of this journal know, technology is not a neutral entity that simply does good when
people have access to it – it is complex and social cultural artefact. By putting technology into
homes that are already likely to be struggling financially, and suffering more since the COVID-19
outbreak, the internet will provide access to their teachers, information and social support, and all
of these things are important. However, the internet also provides: payday loan companies and gam-
bling companies with easier access to families who are already struggling financially, content and
people that young people should not have access to, and data brokers with more information that
may negatively impact the families’ future.
This, taken together with the problems that we often see with ‘EdTech’ companies and the kinds
of digital education on offer (Sancho-Gil, Rivera-Vargas, and Miño-Puigcercós 2020), means that we
need to think about dealing with digital inequalities in a different way. The primary reason these
families do not have digital access is because of a lack of material resources due to social inequality.
These economic realities do not go away as a result of a laptop scheme. Indeed, as this pandemic
continues, more and more young people and their families will be in financial hardship and inequal-
ities in society are likely to widen.
Technology cannot fix social inequality. Though access schemes will help (if done well) it is
important to think more holistically and in the longer term. We should not simply think about
the issues of digital inequalities in relation to questions of access, but instead to see this time as
an important moment to support, regulate and design an inclusive digital future for us all, that is
part of a society that is more socially just. Social, educational, health and digital inequalities have
never been clearer. Perhaps now is a time to make a more decisive set of significant social and digital
changes.

Spaces and hierarchies in pandemic times: re-locating digital pedagogy

Being in lockdown in pandemic times and working from home, for those of us fortunate enough to
be on the right side of inequality and with the opportunity to do so, means further consideration of
the ways in which spatial and temporal relations are changed in the (digital) work we do as educators
and researchers. There is no simple mapping of offline onto online that can escape the essential dis-
juncture between what is possible and what is impossible under these circumstances, no matter how
many times parents and/or educators are told that it is easy and that the ‘digital’ makes it so.
Articles in Learning Media and Technology in recent years, in pre-pandemic times, have explored
what happens when technological devices are brought from home into school, critiquing the Bring
Your Own Device (BYOD) movement, and exploring the ways in which they alter relations in class-
room space-time (e.g., Alirezabeigi, Masschelein, and Decuypere 2020). The lockdown in many
countries occasioned by the pandemic requires us to hold the mirror up to what happens when class-
room space-time travels in the other direction, into the home environment, introducing the poly-
synchronous world of learning in the digital age into the rhythms of family life. We might call
this the Bring Your Own School Home (BYOSH) movement. In this environment, personal
screen-time is taken over at the same time as the physical spaces of the home are colonized and
co-opted. Those grappling with the delicate ecosystem of parenting in the digital age realize that
this is anything but remote learning. It is up close and personal and with the customary territorial
trade-offs of colonization. The promise of both the infotainment value (as in the recent BBC here
in the UK providing celebrities as teachers) and the familiar hype of ‘anytime’, ‘anywhere’ learning
are ever present except that this carries the potential promise, or threat, of ‘all the time’ and ‘every-
where’. So, routines are disrupted, but not in the ways nor in the places imagined by ed-tech adver-
tising; spaces are invaded by devices and screens which have now, like the eponymous character in
Diana Wynne-Jones’s novel Archer’s Goon (2000), melted into the foreground and, finally, roles are
renegotiated and re-imagined under terms and conditions no one thought would ever apply.
Schools, colleges and universities are of course reacting in different ways in this BYOSH environ-
ment. Expectations are calibrated differently in different contexts with, at local level in the UK, some
112 EDITORIAL

headteachers and university chancellors sensibly lowering expectations and pressure on all parties.
Transitioning from offline to online teaching and learning has long been found by its earliest
researchers and exponents to be complex, problematic and evolutionary, though it can be done
by managing the unrealistic expectations that you will be doing substantially the same thing with
time, space and material artefacts as you did in face-to-face teaching. As you know by now, if you
are currently working at distance with students, you won’t be doing the same things. If you are
also, perhaps, a parent or carer, simultaneously in receipt of ‘online learning’ to ‘deliver’, you will
know the additional attention and cognitive overload only too well.
In the recent ‘looking to the future editorial’ for Learning, Media and Technology (Selwyn et al.
2020), the authors speculated on ten areas towards which critical educational technology researchers
should be directing their attention in the next ten years. It was written in pre-pandemic times but
anticipates, in many relevant ways, how the locus of control of pedagogy needs to be questioned
and even relocated, away from remote, unaccountable, unethical systems and into the hands of edu-
cators and communities. The final idea in that piece opens up more exciting and ambitious possibi-
lities than those routinely voiced as technology making things more ‘effective’, speaking instead to
the everyday creativity of what they label ‘convivial technologies’. Here we could invoke the notion
of practices which speak back to power, where the direction of flow is not about ‘content’ being deliv-
ered downstream by algorithm but about more open, agentive and productive spaces for both lear-
ners and educators. We might find these ‘third spaces’ in practices around digital media in an era
when testing and performativity measures are relaxed through circumstances beyond the control
of the neoliberal imaginary and where these difficult times produce surprising and hopeful outcomes.
Certainly there is work to be done on each of the following: the due diligence associated with the
educational technology industry in these times; addressing, not glossing over, the inequalities we
see around us; and with paying attention to how we can better identify the practices which flatten
hierarchies and generate a productive pedagogy for the times in which we live and work.

Emergency edtech experimentation

Our final reflection here is on the ways that emergency remote teaching has been positioned in
‘experimental’ terms. According to an article in Quartz magazine, coronavirus has catalysed
the world’s biggest educational technology (edtech) experiment in history. With 1.5 billion students out of
school and hundreds of millions attempting to learn solely online, the experiment will reshape schools, the
idea of education, and what learning looks like in the 21st century. (Anderson 2020)

This idea of experimentation makes remote learning students, teachers and parents into laboratory
subjects whose contingent experiences and activities are being observed for insights about the future
of edtech itself.
The global edtech experiment is also an opportunity to produce very large quantities of student
data, as students are forced online into data-intensive digital learning environments at unprece-
dented scale. For researchers and organizations invested in data scientific forms of analysis in edu-
cation, as Zimmerman (2020) put it in The Chronicle of Higher Education, coronavirus is an
opportunity for a ‘great online learning experiment’:
Coronavirus … has created a set of unprecedented natural experiments. For the first time, entire student bodies
have been compelled to take all of their classes online. So we can examine how they perform in these courses
compared to the face-to-face kind, without worrying about the bias of self-selection. It might be hard to get
good data if the online instruction only lasts a few weeks. But at institutions that have moved to online-only
for the rest of the semester, we should be able to measure how much students learn in that medium compared
to the face-to-face instruction they received earlier.

The argument exemplified by Zimmerman is that the coronavirus crisis is a natural experimental
opportunity for education data scientists – both those in academic education research and analysts
working in edtech companies and other edu-businesses – to demonstrate the effectiveness of online
 LEARNING, MEDIA AND TECHNOLOGY 113

education over face-to-face teaching. Zimmerman even argued that it should be considered a kind of
moral responsibility for universities to use the chance to figure out if online education outperforms
in-person teaching, even though, he said, ‘if students showed more gains from online instruction,
professors who teach face-to-face classes – like I do – might find their own jobs in peril’ (Zimmer-
man 2020). The data scientific dream of measuring learning at scale in order to develop a precise
understanding of the benefits of remote instruction is clearly animating part of the effort by edtech
businesses and associated researchers to utilize the coronavirus emergency as a mass data-gathering
and analysis opportunity. And this might ultimately, as Zimmerman suggested, lead to a consolida-
tion of online instruction and, as a consequence, exacerbate worker precarity for educators. The
possible contraction of higher education as an on-campus experience, and a shift to remote instruc-
tion and learning, is already concerning many educators.
The effort to position pandemic pedagogies as a natural experimental opportunity for education
data science to ‘prove’ the benefits of digital teaching exemplifies the ways that ‘datafication’ has been
presented as a transformative force in education in recent years. As Jarke and Breiter (2019) put it in
their introduction to a special issue of Learning, Media and Technology on ‘The datafication of edu-
cation’, ‘the education sector is one of the most noticeable domains affected by datafication, because
it transforms not only the ways in which teaching and learning are organised’ and raises expectations
about ‘increased transparency, accountability, service orientation and civic participation but also
associated fears with respect to surveillance and control, privacy issues, power relations, and
(new) inequalities’ (Jarke and Breiter 2019, 1). From this perspective, efforts to datafy the student
experience of education during the pandemic need to be understood as an extreme manifestation
of longer-term aspirations to render education legible as numbers through increasingly pervasive
technologies and techniques of surveillance. The COVID-19 pandemic is being treated as a labora-
tory experiment in mass-scale datafication of education in ways that might further empower and
advance the interests of data-driven edtech companies, researchers and advocates. As millions of stu-
dents sign up to new platforms in order to be able to access education during the pandemic, long-
running concerns over data privacy and the use of data for student profiling and control need to be
brought back into focus.

Towards future research

We raise the four discussions above as critical reflections on ongoing significant changes with poten-
tially long-term consequences for education generally and for research and practice in digital media
and learning specifically. Pandemic education may also illuminate something of longer-term changes
in the relationship between technology and society, with digital services adopted unproblematically
as solutions to any problem (also reflected in current tensions over surveillance and privacy impli-
cations of ‘contact tracing’ apps). Yet these are not all necessarily new issues or problems. Contribu-
tors to Learning, Media and Technology have for many years been confronting questions and
challenges of the political economy of edtech, digital inequalities, spaces and futures of learning,
and datafication of education. The coronavirus emergency has intensified and expanded these.
Rather than calling for a specific research agenda related to coronavirus, our more modest hope is
that the journal will continue to act as a key source of scholarly knowledge and critical analysis
on issues around education, media and technology that have long, contested histories and uncertain
futures. The pandemic politics, pedagogies and practices characteristic of education in 2020 call for a
reinvigorated approach to research on educational technologies and media that is driven by critical
and theoretically informed analysis. Learning, Media and Technology remains a key forum for orig-
inal research in these areas. We welcome contributions that not only take the current pandemic as
their focus or context of analysis, but continue to advance our understanding of historically and con-
textually specific education and technology-related policies, practices, and problems that are now
more urgent than ever.
114 EDITORIAL

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Ben Williamson
University of Edinburgh

Rebecca Eynon
University of Oxford

John Potter
Institute of Education, University College London

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